Dialogues with Degas

Dialogues with Degas demonstrates the ongoing relevance of Edgar Degas to 20th- and 21st-century ideas and art practices.
The first in-depth examination of this major artist's impact on contemporary art, this book explores how contemporary practitioners have used Degas's creativity as a springboard to engage imaginatively and critically with themes of colonialism, gender, race and class. Individual chapters are devoted to dialogues between Degas's art and works produced by Frank Auerbach, Cecily Brown, Xinyi Cheng, Ryan Gander, Maggi Hambling, Damien Hirst, Howard Hodgkin, Chantal Joffe, Leon Kossoff, R.B. Kitaj, Juan Muñoz, Paula Rego, Jenny Saville, Yinka Shonibare, Cy Twombly and Rebecca Warren.
Through close analyses of selected paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures, Kathryn Brown explores how Degas's technical and compositional experiments have been extended or challenged in innovative ways. By experimenting with the materials and methods of existing works, contemporary artists generate visual palimpsests that make new demands of the viewer and prompt a reconsideration of ideas that have informed histories of 19th-century French art.
The book overturns familiar conceptions of influence by eschewing a genealogical approach and prioritizing, instead, the analysis of non-linear encounters between artworks. This encourages a new conception of the agency of visual artefacts and of the conversations they are capable of entertaining with each other. While this study sheds new light on Degas's art and that of his interlocutors, it also has methodological significance for the writing of art history.

Kathryn Brown is Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Loughborough University, UK. Her books include Women Readers in French Painting 1870-1890 (2012), Matisse's Poets: Critical Performance in the Artist's Book (Bloomsbury, 2017) and Henri Matisse (2021). She is the series editor of Contextualizing Art Markets (Bloomsbury).

Acknowledgements
List of Colour Plates
List of Figures

Introduction
Influence and Antagonism
Art out of Time
Structure and Approach

1. Degas and the School of London
R. B. Kitaj and the Anxious Condition of Art Making
The Anti-Dreyfusard Master
Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach Draw Degas
2. Influence as Excess
Misogyny
Paula Rego's Dog Women
Cecily Brown: New Provocations
3. Vitrines, Vacancy, and Immanent Things: Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer
Medicine and Moral Judgment: Damien Hirst
Entangled Histories: Yinka Shonibare
Ryan Gander's Empathetic Storytelling
4. Degas Doubled
Rebecca Warren as Twin
Juan Muñoz and Miss La La's Legacy
5. Pearl Divers: Prying Loose the Past
Maggi Hambling's Monotypes: Queer Phenomenology and the Gaze
Chantal Joffe's Bathers: Self and Other
Xinyi Cheng: Modern Masculinities
6. The Final Act
Jenny Saville: Colour Shock
Howard Hodgkin's Hero
Conclusion
Cy Twombly and Degas's Hat
Degas Unbound

Notes
Bibliography
Index